


"Come," she bade.

by 0Rocky41_7



Series: Guinevere Lavellan: This Shit is Weird [2]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Ambiguous Lavellan, Dreams, F/M, Gen, Post-Trespasser
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-16
Updated: 2019-03-16
Packaged: 2019-11-20 20:50:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18131954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/0Rocky41_7/pseuds/0Rocky41_7
Summary: And Lavellan dreamed of the Dread Wolf.





	"Come," she bade.

**S** he first dreamed of the Dread Wolf, and thought it a shadow of her mind. She would not look, acknowledge, reward this ghost of her aching breast with attention. She walked through the empty palace at Val Royeaux, and behind her paced the Dread Wolf, its thick paws heavy on the marble floors, its hulking shoulders stalking her down the endless hallway. The light was dim, and the gilded moldings did not glint and catch her eye as they had at Halamshiral.

                The eyes pierced her back, catching her breath, but she tightened her jaw and did not turn.

                _I will not look,_ she thought. _I will not._ The wolf stayed in the hall, and did not follow her into the rooms, and when she exited, she was careful not to cast her eyes even in his direction.

                She woke before she reached the end of the hallway.

                **T** hen she dreamed of the Dread Wolf, and she knew it was him. She stood in the great grass field, with the steel clouds warring overhead, and held her hands out to him.

                “Come back, _vhenan_ ,” she pleaded. “Don’t do this. You have seen there is more to us than you thought. Let us continue to show you. You said what we had was real! Then you know how I love you—you knew before I ever said it. You feel it, in your heart.” The wolf stayed standing, and did not blink, or move. “Come home,” she begged. “I know this world must be frightening and confusing to you, but you are clever, and I will be there with you. Don’t destroy it just because it is not what you expected. Do not be so quick to cause such chaos—do not prove the Dalish right about Fen’Harel.” Nary a twitch of the wolf’s ear. “Talk to me, _lethallen_.” She advanced on the beast, hands outstretched. “Please, I know you are not immune to reason.” The wolf retreated from her, ears flattening. She stilled.

                “I have not given up this fight,” she told him, her voice nearly swallowed up by the vast sky. She sat carefully amidst the long grass, folding her legs and laying her hands in her lap. “I will not give up on you. The others believe you cannot be saved. But I have seen the softness in you, the kindness, and I believe it is there still. The hurt, the guilt, it chokes you, it makes you lash out, and you are as a cornered wolf, desperate and angry that things are not what you wanted—what you meant—for them to be. You thought you had already made the ultimate sacrifice to save the elves, and now you see what you have cost them, and it seems so cruelly unfair, that it should be such a double-edged blade.

                “But we are not gone! Weaker, more ignorant, but not without promise,” she urged. “I have always told you I believe in a future for the elves. We were great once—that greatness is in us still. But we will do better than before. We will not allow those like the Evanuris to rise. We will not keep slaves, or wage wars for power. We will learn from the past. A past that _you_ can teach us.” If she talked long enough, perhaps he would speak, or understand, she could _make_ him see, she could use the force of her desire for his peace to sway him. And so she went on, and in the Fade her tongue did not grow weary and slow, and if she was silent for long periods, thinking of what to say, they passed in the blink of an eye, and all the while the Dread Wolf stood and watched her, and did not speak, or shift.

                When she woke, she considered what she would say if she saw the Dread Wolf again.

                **T** hen she dreamed of the Dread Wolf, and talked, and talked. Night after night, she spilled her words in an endless babble, sometimes seeking to hit a pressure point, sometimes hurling buckets of words at him in the frantic hope that _something_ would stick.

                He never spoke, nor even showed his elven form, only watched her with round yellow eyes and slouched shoulders. Perhaps it was not him at all, and only a figment of her weary, longing mind, but she talked anyway, for there was little left to her where he was concerned, but hope.

                **T** hen she dreamed of the Dread Wolf, and he was ever out of her reach. She chased him across the open tundra, fingers clawing at the air, reaching, stretching, yearning—but never touching. When she stepped after him, he moved back—when she quickened her pace, he ran. So she gave chase, thinking in the Fade, he had no physical advantage over her.

                They spoke no words—her mind was focused on the pounding of her feet against the flat ground, the sight of the wolf’s tail just beyond her, and the perpetual sense that if she could put on another burst of speed, she could seize him.

                Never did her fingers brush his fur, but she went on tirelessly. They raced across the frozen landscape like Andruil’s arrows, never slowing or tiring. The air seemed to burn on her cheeks, and she thought distantly of legends of old, and runners who never tired, or gods who chased each other for centuries. So she and the Dread Wolf ran, streaking a mural across a temple wall, sprinting through myth and story.

                For a thousand years they ran through the thin mist, but she woke before the Dread Wolf vanished from her dreamscape, and still he was out of her grasp.

                **T** hen she dreamed of the Dread Wolf, and her words grew sharp; she did not understand why he refused to engage with her—why he continued to visit her at all.

                “You want to destroy the world! You’ve already done it!” she screamed. “You put up the Veil and you took _everything_ from us! You fell asleep and we were crushed, and enslaved, and oppressed, and told we were _nothing_ , for a thousand years! And now you wake up and scoff that we have forgotten our history—the history you _stole_ from us—and—and—! You know _nothing_ of what it has been like for us since Arlathan fell!

                “ _We_ have carried _ourselves_ through the last millennium, without you, or the Evanuris, or anyone else! You left us to die, but we did not. Tevinter sought to crush us in its fist, but we survived. Orlais and Ferelden have maligned us at every opportunity, tried to drive us out or oppress us into dust. But we are still here. We have clawed and dragged and battled our way through a thousand years of suffering and cruelty, and _now_ you come and tell us we are just shadows of what the Elvhen were. The Elvhen are _dead._

                “The world you know is _gone_! You cannot bring it back. You think you know how it will go, that you will tear down the Veil, and remake your world—but you proved by putting it up you toy with magic beyond even your ken! You did not foresee what would happen when you threw up the Veil, but you purport to know what will happen when you pull it down? You of all people should be cautious! But you have none—consumed with your own guilt and confusion you will rend this world apart to try to restore something you understand.

                “You are alone in the world now,” she said, her jaw tight, her hands curled into fists. In her dreams, she always had both hands. “And it terrifies you, and so you will bring back the Elvhen and the Evanuris, to restore what was, and comfort yourself. You will ignore what exists already—me, and the Inquisition, and the friends you have here. You will let us die, to comfort yourself.”

                Her head bowed, and tremors shivered her shoulders.

                “I am ashamed I thought you were a good person.”

                When she woke, every muscle in her body felt sore, and she had shadows under her eyes, but no remarks were made.

 **T** hen she dreamed of the Dread Wolf, and went on shouting, night after night. She ran out of angry words faster than she had drained of pleading ones, and at last she came to him in the towering forest—perhaps the Emerald Graves, or the forest of Arlathan, or somewhere in the Free Marches, or none of these at all—and howled.

She looked into those distant yellow eyes and shrieked; no words, just a long, breaking wail of her pain. If wolves could howl, so could she—and she would stop dressing her feelings to present to him—she would make him see what he had left her with.

_See me! I have no words left! I have no words for you!_

All the destruction wreaked upon the world by Corypheus, everything they had gone through with the Inquisition—the injury, the loss, the death, the fear—the struggles of the Dalish, her journey of recovery after he had vanished—and he meant to make it all worthless. To set them on the same path they had been on when she stumbled out of the Fade for the first time.

There was catharsis, in an unbridled display of her own wretchedness. She could not be so as the Inquisitor; there was an image to keep, and she owed it to all those looking to her for answers to be strong. If they only knew how much she relied on Cassandra, Josephine, and Leliana for that!

She did not grow weary here, only felt that she had gone on as long as was necessary, and finally fell quiet. It might have been hours she stood there and screamed at him; she didn’t know. She only knew that when she stopped, everything had been drained from her. Falling to the ground, with her back against a tree trunk, she drew her knees up, and pressed the heel of her left hand to her forehead.

There could be truth in the others’ feeling that he was beyond their help.

“Say something,” she whispered, without raising her head. “Anything.”

He said nothing, and she woke with tearstains streaking down into her hair.

 **T** hen she dreamed of the Dread Wolf, and said nothing.

They were on a mountaintop, and the wind blowing over them should have been cold, but she felt nothing. Again she sat, folding her legs, and now she watched him back. Years passed, and he sat, paws placed neatly in front of him. Did he wait for her? He would wait a long time, she decided.

They had spent so much time in the Fade together, it was only appropriate it was now their sole means of contact. But she would not reward him tonight with words—would not approve of his shadowing through her dreams, like a burr stuck to her coat’s hem. If there was something he wanted from her, she would have him say it.

She almost broke her silence several times, in an attempt to goad him into speaking, if nothing more.

_You’re a coward. You won’t even speak to me. Won’t even say my name._

_You have nothing to say? After all that’s happened?_

_If you care nothing for me—not even enough to spare my life—why bother with this charade?_

But she was certain nothing she said could be as damning as her silence, so she kept it, and held his steady gaze with a flat expression.

The urge came over her, to touch him. To reach out, and dig her fingers into that thick, coarse fur, and press her face into a shoulder, tight with muscle. If he would not speak, he could allow her that at least. But he had avoided her touch since he left her at Crestwood, with the one exception to remove the anchor, and she would not give him the pleasure of seeing her reach for him. Let him sit there, alight with desire for it, insistent on refusing should she offer, and wait to see if she would.

The air was thin, or it was just her imagination playing games, because she saw mountains, and expected the feeling of altitude. She flexed and curled her left hand in her lap, wriggling the phantom fingers. There was something to get used to—wielding a staff with one hand.

When she began to wake, she could feel herself detaching from the mountain, her consciousness returning to the physical world. Fixing him with one last piercing look, she closed her eyes and opened them again in her chambers. Sunlight—true and warm—filtered in around the edges of her curtains.

Outside, Cassandra would be there, ready to make plans for the day, while Josephine reminded them of their long-term goals. There would be breakfast—simple and hearty—and she would train with her staff, and continue her hunt. And when she came back to bed, she would dream again of the Dread Wolf—but he would not have the upper hand forever. She was coming for him.

**Author's Note:**

> I imagine Lavellan has a lot to say to Solas that she probably will never get to, and I imagine his self-control is largely formed upon keeping a strict distance between them.
> 
>  
> 
> [On tumblr](http://imakemywings.tumblr.com/post/183496979875/come-she-bade)
> 
>  
> 
> [On Pillowfort](https://www.pillowfort.social/posts/623469)


End file.
